Dr Jan Woischnik is a fully qualified lawyer (in German: Volljurist) with an international focus. He was born on 7 February 1970 in Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany). He completed his secondary school studies at the Eberhard Ludwigs Gymnasium (school with a humanistic approach) in Stuttgart and studied law in Heidelberg, Hamburg and Freiburg between 1990 and 1994. In 1995, he passed the first and in 1997, the second state examination in Baden-Württemberg. In 2001, he received his doctoral degree from the University of Mainz (with a doctoral scholarship of the Lang Heinrichsen Foundation and research stays in Buenos Aires with the support of the Max Planck Society).

At the beginning of his professional career, Jan Woischnik worked in Freiburg for four years from 1996 to 1999 as a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law (Department of Spanish-American and International Criminal Law). In 2000, he was appointed as an international lawyer for the German Foreign Office to the Human Rights Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo, where he spent nine months.

In early 2001, Jan Woischnik joined the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, first as head of the transnational rule of law programme for Latin America and director of the Uruguay office (2001-2006), and subsequently as desk officer at the South-East Europe division and coordinator of the global rule of law programme at the foundation's headquarters in Berlin (2006-2011). From 2011 to 2015, he headed the foundation's office in Indonesia and East Timor, based in Jakarta. After that, and until 2019, he was head of the KAS field office in Brazil, based in Rio de Janeiro. Since October 2019, Jan Woischnik has been head of the Latin America department in the area of European and International Cooperation in the Berlin headquarters. He is fluent in English, Portuguese and Spanish and proficient in French, Italian and Bahasa Indonesia.